Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Friday, December 16, 2005

The Value of the Free Press, (If Used)

Although there's good reason to bemoan the MSM (part of it will be cited here), there's also a good reason the Founders enshrined 'free press' in the 1st Amendment.

On December 6, 2005, villagers in Shanwei, a small town in Southern China, staged a protest outside of a power plant that had been built on their expropriated farms. Acting with their usual restraint, the Communists fired machine guns into the crowd of men, women and children.The Communist Chinese government is claiming only 3 dead, but Lost Budgie's China sources say the number will eventually reach over 100 dead. Telecommunications and internet service in the area have been cut off, and police have been confiscating cameras and cell-phones. The bodies of the dead have not been returned to the families and it is expected by many that the Communists will dispose of the bodies to hide the death toll and killing of children.Except that the Free Press is NOT all over this story:

The Epoch Times is following the story closely, but no one in the western media really seems to give a damn.PRChina holds an interesting position in the world. There are lots of US apologists for PRC, and many of them are major players in the Fortune 500 (Rick Waggoner, for example, doesn't mention PRC's little problems like this one.) After all, there's money to be made over there, right?

GWB and the State bozos have been very quiet, although the President has recently begun speaking up about PRC's notorious and well-reported human rights abuses (of the sort described above) and religious-rights abuses (see, e.g., any story on Catholic priests or Christians in PRChina.)

The US press has been ambivalent, at best, and clueless or silent at worst. Sorta reminds you of the US press' take on Saddam back a few years ago, eh?